Geographic information systems (GIS) are used in a very wide variety of applications in industries such as urban planning, agriculture, defense, utilities, oil and gas and the like. In virtually all GIS applications, the data and analysis performed on it are in two dimensions that typically represent coordinates on the surface of the earth. GIS technology is different from other computer-generated maps in that it allows for the existence and the access to the underlying informational database. For example, a GIS-generated map of the United States showing counties could be queried interactively to provide data on populations in counties, or income or any other variable tied to the underlying database that contained county-level information. In oil and gas applications, a two-dimensional GIS-generated map of oil fields would typically contain data on the reserves of the fields, number of wells, production levels, etc., all of which could be interactively queried by the user. GIS technology is also different from other computer-generated maps in that it has the ability to perform spatial analysis, the results of which are related to the location of mapped features and their attributes. For example, in a GIS-based “911” system, an operator receiving an emergency call enters the caller's address and the GIS computes the closest fire station to the caller and the shortest-time route from that station to the caller. In oil and gas applications, an analysis could be performed that mapped all oil wells that produce over a certain volume of oil per day and are located within a specific distance of an identified oil pipeline. This type of application would help determine the long-run supply of oil from that pipeline.
In the oil and gas industry, the application of GIS technology to specific problems is typically accomplished by utilizing a generic GIS software platform, adding data to it and, in some instances, customizing the GIS software for the specific application. The GIS software platforms are purchased typically from one of the major developers such as Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) located in Redlands, Calif. that sells several types of GIS systems under the general names ArcInfo, ArcView and ArcGIS; MapInfo Corporation located in Troy, N.Y. that sells GIS systems under the general name of MapInfo; Intergraph Corporation located in Huntsville, Ala. that sells a family of GIS platforms under the general name GeoMedia; and the like. Data used in the system is typically either provided by the user or purchased from a geospatial data vendor or governmental agencies such as IHS Energy (Englewood, Colo.), PennWell Corporation (Tulsa, Okla.), A2D Technologies (Humble, Tex.), the US Geological Survey, the US Minerals Management Service, state geological surveys, and the like. Customization of the GIS platform to specific purposes can also be done by the users, contract GIS programmers, firms specializing in this work such as Earth Science Associates (Long Beach, Calif.) and the like. U.S. Pat. No. 6,012,016 (hereby expressly incorporated by reference in its entirety) typifies the process above in which a user has developed customized programming for a generic GIS platform (in their preferred embodiment, one of the products of ESRI) to manage and analyze oil well data obtained from a geospatial data vendor (in their preferred embodiment, Petroleum Information Corporation, now part of IHS Energy).
Most applications of GIS technology to date concern only features on the surface of the earth and provide two dimensions (identified by the latitude and longitude coordinates of location) to represent feature locations and to perform spatial operations on them. For example, in the oil and gas industry, features in two-dimensional GIS are represented by points (e.g., oil wells) and lines (e.g., oil pipelines) or polygons (e.g., the area of an oil field). While two-dimensional analysis is sufficient for some applications, three-dimensional analysis is preferred for various applications including, without limitations, oil and gas GIS applications because oil and gas fields are by their nature three-dimensional. Fields are not located on the surface of the earth, but thousands of feet below the surface. The accumulations of oil and gas at these depths occupy rock strata of a certain thickness, which may vary over the lateral (i.e., two-dimensional) extent of the field. Oil and gas wells are also three-dimensional, having trajectories that are only fully described by a series of triplets of observations that list the path of the well in latitude, longitude and depth below a datum (usually mean sea level). Accordingly, there is a need for three-dimensional GIS technology.
Existing three-dimensional GIS technology is limited and generally falls into two categories. The first category is representation of the three-dimensional topography of the earth's surface in a GIS system, most commonly known as a digital terrain model. For example, both ESRI's ArcView and ArcInfo GIS products have the capability of estimating an irregular surface from data sets of observations on the elevation of the earth's surface at control points located by their latitude and longitude. That surface may then be introduced and manipulated within their generic GIS platforms. MapInfo's MapInfo Professional GIS product allows viewing and manipulation of a digital terrain model within its system. U.S. Pat. No. 5,790,123 (hereby expressly incorporated by reference in its entirety) describes a method for generating terrain surfaces and lists its use within a GIS as an application. U.S. Pat. No. 6,229,546 (hereby expressly incorporated by reference in its entirety) describes a method and system for generation of terrain models, which may be assisted by the use of a GIS in the data management phase of the process. However, the output surface from the method, in a file format called VRML, would require modification for use within at least some commercial GIS platforms (e.g., ArcView), as VRML is not a valid input data format. Moreover, while generation of a three-dimensional surface and introduction of it into a three-dimensional GIS is an important innovation, such a surface is an irregular plane, not a three-dimensional volume. Such a surface, therefore, is geometrically insufficient to describe a three-dimensional volume such as an oil and gas reservoir, an aquifer, a defined volume of water within an ocean, sea or lake, a defined air mass within the atmosphere, and the like. Accordingly, there is a need to provide a three-dimensional GIS system that can create and manipulate a three-dimensional volume.
The second category of existing three-dimensional GIS technology is representation of man-made structures located on the earth's surface, such as buildings. These applications typically take files generated by computer-aided design (CAD) software systems that provide the latitude, longitude and elevation of points sufficient to describe a structure (e.g., the locations of the corners of a base of the building and the top of a building). For example, in ESRI's 3-D Analyst extension to ArcView, the GIS reads those coordinates and connects the control points to create virtual walls, floors and roofs to a building and correctly locates the building on the representation of the earth's surface within a three-dimensional GIS scene. It is then possible to assign attributes to the three-dimensional model of the building so that it can be queried within the GIS and allows users to perform spatial operations on those three-dimensional features. In such an application, the model of the building built by the three-dimensional GIS system is an exact (if often simplified) representation of the geometry, as the dimensions and coordinates of buildings are exactly known from blueprint-type information typically produced by CAD software. For very simple geometric shapes (e.g., a building that is geometrically a simple box), the three-dimensional representation can be constructed by “extruding” a rectangle representing the lateral extent of the building to an elevation representing the height of the building top above the surface of the ground (both ESRI and MapInfo systems do this). The ability to create three-dimensional features, such as buildings, constructed on exact boundary coordinates, and use them within a three-dimensional GIS is an important innovation. However, this method is not responsive to construction of three-dimensional features within a three-dimensional GIS where the boundaries are not exactly specified and/or are irregular.
Outside of GIS technology, there are computer methods for visualization of irregular three-dimensional features below the surface of the earth. For example, Schlumberger Information Services (Houston, Tex.) produces a suite of software products under the general name GeoFrame which includes a module called GeoVis that attempts to provide three-dimensionaly visualization of oil and gas reservoirs and other bodies of rock with specific properties. GeoVis relies on volume-cell (voxel) technology in which the volume of earth being modeled is divided into a very large number of three-dimensional cells. Each individual cell is assigned characteristic properties, based on the collection, processing and interpretation of seismic data over that volume of the earth's crust. Cells can be classified based on characteristics of interest (e.g., specific seismic impedance, interpreted values of porosity, interpreted composition of interstitial fluid). Cells belonging to a class can then be “turned-on” or assigned a color so that they can be seen on the computer screen within a three-dimensional volume representing that portion of the earth's crust. By assigning different colors to cells that possess common attributes (or the same range of attribute values), it is possible to see the geometric relationships between natural, irregular three-dimensional bodies within the volume of the earth's crust under examination. Another example, is Landmark Graphics' (Houston, Tex.) “volume interpretation system” called Earth Cube, which is very similar to GeoVis. Earth Cube input data comes principally from seismic data acquired throughout a volume of the earth's crust and it represents sub-volumes of interest by attributes assigned to a very large number of cells into which the total volume is divided. U.S. Pat. No. 4,991,095 (hereby expressly incorporated by reference in its entirety) also describes a method for generation of three-dimensional computer models of irregular geologic features using the volume-cell approach. While the volume-cell approach to visualization of irregular three-dimensional features in the subsurface is an important method for visualization, these techniques are not part of GIS technology. Thus, they do not support GIS functionalities of relating unified features (as opposed to a collection of discrete cells with the same attribute values) to underlying databases. They also do not have the ability to perform the spatial analytic functions (e.g., query, legending, measurement, proximity, intersection, and the like) associated with GIS technology.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide a three-dimensional GIS system that can create and manipulate a three-dimensional irregular volume even if the boundaries of such volume are not specified.